Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.06.2011, Blaðsíða 38

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38
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2011
Life | Access
A few years back fate
brought me to Húsavík, a
small town in northern Ice-
land. Fate? Well, friends were
getting married close by, it was friend-
ship that brought me, but I had a mini-
revelation there, the whimsiest little
epiphany. Húsavík is a pretty little town,
with pretty little houses, and during the
summer it's crowded with tourists. You
might have been there. I heard more
Italian and French than Icelandic there.
Life centres around the harbour,
where once upon a time they must
have caught fish, but now offer whale
watching tours. The harbour has been
organised as its own little world, at-
tractive sign-posts pointing this way
for tickets, that way for dining—they
have stuff that looks like amusement,
along with restaurants and cafés in the
plural, which is more than could have
been said about any small town in Ice-
land less than two decades ago.
THE REVELATION
I sat there and observed the people
boarding, unboarding, dining—mem-
bers of the professional classes with
their spouses and offspring—and
thought to myself: this is what money
is for. It was a revelation of the sort that
neoliberal pundits hope we all have at
one point or another: this is what mon-
ey is for.
My great-grandfather saw money
for the first time when he was eleven
years old. Money as our daily means
of exchange, something we all use and
are aware of, is a very recent thing.
Still during the first decades of the
twentieth century it was more com-
mon in Icelandic municipalities that the
same company would employ you as a
worker, and handle the groceries, while
taking care that you earned a little less
than you spent. Your wages and your
purchases would be kept in the com-
pany's register, leaving actual money in
the hands of the owners. Keeping you
in debt made sure you wouldn't leave.
In the 18th century, when Ice-
land got its own prison, now the seat
of government, the first people to be
locked up were the drifters. Locked up
and forced to labour for the growing
town's first industrial enterprise. Even
today wandering—wandering without
some sort of capital, be it financial or
social—is considered hazardous to our
street-number-based societies, as can
be seen by the way European countries,
Iceland included, treat members of the
Roma population.
THREE WAYS TO TRAVEL
Before the advent of money there
were three ways to travel: you could
go around with an army, looting your
way through the world—or as a thief,
observing the same logic on a smaller
scale. You could go around as member
of a church or a convent, in the cer-
tainty that other churches or convents
would greet you and treat you kindly,
as you would one day treat someone
else in return. Members of the aris-
tocracy could rely on a little bit of both
as well as on the hospitality of their
benevolent peers—not the ones who
would rather get rid of you. The moral
logic of greeting and treating a traveller
kindly is noted in the Icelandic Viking
verses Hávamál, but implicitly reserved
to upper classes—thralls are a different
category, spoken of but not directly ad-
dressed by the poet. Your third option
would be to go around begging. Three
options: Steal, observe ritual, or beg.
But only money, and the purchases
with which our daily lives are now satu-
rated, was the tourist made possible.
French and Italian families could finally
spend their idle time in Húsavík and see
some whales.
Sitting by the pier in Húsavík I
thought to myself: this is magnificent.
This is absolutely wonderful. How de-
liciously absurd that this is even pos-
sible—not only technologically, but
socially: that with a bank note or an
electronic stripe in your pocket you can
whimsically go around the globe and
rest assured that you will suffer nei-
ther hunger nor thirst, nor lack a place
to stay. And you don't even have to be
polite, let alone observe religious ritual.
TWO ATTITUDES TOWARDS TOUR-
ISTS
So much for the glory of capitalism.
Everyone is an anti-capitalist now,
also the neoliberals of old—ask any-
one about Davíð Oddsson, Hannes
Hólmsteinn, Styrmir Gunnarsson and
their legacy: currently they spend their
days blogging, inventing curses against
global capitalism, 'bad capitalists', and
greed. Right-wing or conservative cap-
italist critique comes in two flavours
that can be detected by their attitude
towards tourists.
There are those who detest the
whale-watchers in Húsavík. They will
find it tasteless, plebeian, offensive,
that such ignoramuses can step on an
airplane, notice nothing on the way ex-
cept the boarding signs and whatever
DVD they watch on board, catch a ride
or rent a car to Húsavík, hop on board
a boat, watch whales—those mundane
albeit large swimming meat contain-
ers—and act as if they own the place,
without being even slightly interested
in the locals, the sagas or the latest
town council disputes. The other, more
affluent, sort consists of those who like
the idea of tourism, practice it them-
selves from time to time, but do so on
the presumption that the tourists are
the sorts of persons they could imagine
inviting to their own living room. They
assume sameness, that wherever the
tourist comes from, he is not a total
stranger.
SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT
What the Left, however, has in com-
mon with the now almost universally
despised libertarians, is admiration for
the wonders of this minimal alienation:
you don't have to be nice to be entitled.
The rights of money are observed in
the way all rights should be—the differ-
ence between a right and a permission
is precisely this: a right is something
you neither work for (and no, no one
really every got rich from work, keep
your myths in your pocket, please)
nor have to prove by displaying intel-
ligence, kindness or any other virtue—
you neither ask for it nor earn it, since
it is not granted: once declared, a right
is simply yours. Our current challenge,
the ongoing challenge of modern times,
is this: how to make the liberty of the
whale-watchers in Húsavík—their inde-
pendence—independent from arbitrary
factors such as property?
Whatever they've told you in the last
two decades, there is a leftist utopia:
it is where anyone is considered en-
titled to a lot of things, anywhere, at
any time—where you don't have to like
a person to grant him or her what is
already his or hers. This universal en-
titlement is already nominally secured
in the UN Declaration of Human Rights,
which includes not just the right to life,
to shelter and nourishment, free speech
etc., but the right to receive education
and enjoy culture. The charter is quite a
radical document, once fully observed.
The leftist emphasis on justice and
equality is not supposed to be a step
backwards from mobility, but precisely
the universalisation of mobility.
So how do you tell whether an
anti-capitalist project is an emancipa-
tory project deserving the honourable
label Left, or the conservative people-
should-stay-where-they-belong-and-
observe-good-old-values sort of thing?
Currently this method is valid: Once
such a project has been declared by a
government, you observe the languag-
es spoken at the country's main sites
of attraction. If a growing number of
the people who go whale-watching in
Húsavík, say, come from countries with
a lower GDP than Iceland, if you hear
Hindu, Arabic and Swahili more often,
year by year, someone is doing some-
thing progressive. Something progres-
sive such as deciding that from now
when people from sub-Saharan Africa
make enquiries about tourist visas to
Iceland, they get a reply. If this is not
the case, and the whale-watchers stay
thoroughly OECD, then whatever sort
of socialism is going on, sorry to say:
it's just not the progressive sort.
The Universal Project Of
Whale-Watching In Húsavík
HAUKUR MÁR HELGASON
GúNDI
This article's author, philosopher/filmmaker Haukur Már Helgason, is premier-
ing a documentary on the RVK9 case at the Skjaldborg film festival this month
(www.skjaldborg.com). It's called Ge9n, and we hear it's pretty awesome.